Data Virtualization Simplifies and Accelerates VVOL Adoption

VMware vSphere 6 delivers an exciting breakthrough called
Virtual Volumes (VVOLs), which enables the provisioning, monitoring and
management of storage at the virtual disk level. However, upgrading to VMware
vSphere 6 may require the purchase of new, VVOL-supported storage. Today, the
list of qualified storage is short, making it costly and challenging to rapidly
adopt VMware’s advanced virtualization solutions, but new technologies are
emerging to overcome these hurdles. Let’s take a look at the benefits VVOLs
offer beyond the traditional VMware approach, how VVOLs resolve them, and how
data virtualization can resolve the problem of limited vendor support.

Moving Beyond the Challenges of Existing Virtualization Storage

With the traditional approach, organizations typically
create multiple datastores to provide the many data services VMs require, which
greatly increases management complexity. Pinpointing problems, such as locating
a VM that is consuming resources, is difficult. Further, even though VMs often
have very different requirements, storage implementations typically depend upon
a single set of policies, and it’s impossible to assign different storage
services to VMs within a traditional datastore.

VVOLs Simplifies and Empowers Storage Management

VMware vSphere 6 eliminates the challenges of traditional storage
architectures for virtualization. It replaces the need to manage multiple
datastores and it also allows organizations to set policies at the virtual disk
(VMDK) level. This means that VMs get exactly the levels of
availability, data protection/recoverability, optimal block sizes, and
performance they require.

Data Virtualization Simplifies and Accelerates VVOLs Adoption

While organizations are eager to benefit from VVOLs, options
for VVOLs-ready storage are currently limited. In addition, adding new storage
can take months depending on the enterprise’s budget and procurement process.
Data virtualization offers a solution by abstracting data from underlying
hardware. This makes it possible to create a universal VVOLs provider that makes
existing and new storage resources—from server-side flash to NAS and cloud
storage—VVOL-capable. Regardless of storage vendor management, or protocol
type, only one VVOL datastore is presented to VMware, greatly simplifying
manageability. Administrators assign Storage Policies using vSphere Storage Policy Based Management (SPBM) in vCenter that are
mapped to data virtualization objectives. This makes it possible to take
advantage of data virtualization’s automated storage management to guarantee VMs
receive the performance and protection levels they require, and at the lowest
cost.